The Irus Group enables government agencies, financial services firms and other commercial entities to derive better corporate performance understanding from their business intelligence systems. It's critical that true, valid performance metrics be a result of an organization's investment in expensive and complex business intelligence systems. We help our clients get a complete understanding of their client relationships and business performance because we understand their business drivers and our processes. By following our proven Irus Methodology, we help them better understand and improve their business performance.

According to the Gartner Group, "Corporate performance management (CPM) is an umbrella term that describes the methodologies, metrics, processes and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise." Gartner views CPM as an important concept because it represents the strategic deployment of business intelligence (BI). We have agreed with this concept since our inception in 1996 and also believe that the effective deployment of corporate performance management solutions will enable companies to outperform their industry peers. We help our clients deploy CPM systems so they provide a critical link to their BI systems, all of which will lead to making better business decisions.

Asking the Right Business Questions

The Irus Group thrives on helping our clients utilize the best technology to find answers to the business questions they face. We are uniquely competent to develop their technology solutions since we start the process with by asking the right business questions. When working with our clients to enable effective Corporate Performance Management, we focus on the three fundamental pillars of CPM:

• Metrics
• Business Intelligence
• Process

We look at CPM as a way to regain control of the business, increase organizational credibility, and remove barriers throughout the enterprise. We understand the applications on the market that help our clients achieve these standards. For strategic reporting, strategic formulation and goal achievement, scenario analysis, we use the Oracle Balanced Scorecard and other industry leading applications to help determine how well our clients are performing to plan.

Metrics

We are very diligent about working with our clients to set up the proper metrics to ensure that the technology solutions are built to support the right processes.

• We help determine the metrics that are important to your business and manage to individual targets
• We help our clients define and then create real-time views into their key performance indicators (KPIs) to enable fast, proactive decisions, and organizational response

Ways we accomplish this include balanced scorecard development, expense planning, revenue analysis, and what if analysis. We help our clients conduct profitability analysis down to each customer level. This may require that we help build virtual P&Ls figure out where profitable opportunities are and what non-productive elements could be eliminated. Take revenue and expenses of different units and see what hypothetical units would look like.

Although these metrics are primarily financially based, we also work with our clients to determine other critical metrics. For our commercial clients, high customer satisfaction is an essential part of their business, so activities that focus on customer retention must be planned and measured. While we help our customers keep their eye on the ball from a financial perspective, we understand that financial status is the result of actions and not the actual actions themselves. This understanding helps us work with our clients to ensure that planning and measuring the things that really matter. We want to ensure that we’re helping our clients measure what really drives value in their organization in order to make better business decisions.

Tying Business Intelligence to CPM

Our consultants are expert in tying together business intelligence systems to CPM systems. Most business intelligence consultants do not bridge the two systems together, which does not allow the client to fully utilize their large investment in systems. We are expert in the process of designing, implementing and optimizing the process to then utilize BI technology to answer those questions. We intimately understand the processes necessary to help our customers turn data into information and information into knowledge in order to make better decisions.

Irus Group is uniquely suited to drive executive level Corporate Performance Management understanding from your business intelligence systems. With BI, decision makers can feel the pulse of the organization at any time, evaluate the performance of key business functions and take action based on their analysis of performance sooner, rather than later, when it may be too late to affect change. The following processes are often part of our engagements:

• Monitor and measure performance against goals across sales, finance, budgeting, planning, supply chain, customer and product management, and marketing
• Align and optimize technologies and business processes, tactics and strategies, resources and objectives, business unit and corporate goals
• Focus and execute on bottom-line business drivers across divisions to enhance enterprise-wide performance
• Collaborate and communicate via scalable web-based BI framework for faster, smarter decision making
• Analyze and anticipate revenue cycles, supply chain and product performance, customer behavior, and more
• Understanding current business performance, taking action on that performance, and evaluating the effect of that action
• Create web-enabled dashboards that show scorecards of where the firm is on key metrics.
• Our consultants will help you drill through your underlying data to analyze, compare and answer.

This also includes operational analytics, reporting and consolidation.

The Irus Methodology

After we have helped our clients ascertain the right measures, they need to decide on what targets should be set and how they are going to be delivered. We often participate in strategy sessions with our clients to understand how they will go about achieving the targets. Our expertise in planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting and analytics affords significant value to our clients through this process. Every consulting firm that offers technology solutions needs to be able to participate fully in this process to understand what the systems need to do and what may need to be done in the case of variances that may occur.

Irus Group consultants relish the opportunity to participate in these challenging, time-consuming and difficult activities. We know that we will only be able to truly satisfy our clients if we understand their opportunities and business goals and how they expect to achieve them. The Irus Methodology, which has been developed and continuously refined over the past decade, is closely aligned with business planning processes that our clients engage in. Throughout the process, we constantly analyze every decision and milestone to ensure that the systems we are developing for our clients continues to be relevant.

The Irus Methodology continuously analyzes what can be done today and in the future to help our customers gain true business value from their systems. We understand that implementing an effective BI and CPM system is a difficult process and will only be successful if the business processes are sound. We often find that there are many data sources to draw from representing a huge amount of data, with many different applications supporting them. We are expert in understanding what to do and greatly appreciate the challenges our customers face in this endeavor. We guide them through the technical development to demonstrate our leadership and business understanding.